'Jeopardy' winner, Excel wiz Wayne Winston has the answers

Excel expert Wayne Winston markets Excel With Wayne and is a visiting clinical professor at the University of Houston. His students know he'll engage them through trivia and sports.

Excel expert Wayne Winston markets Excel With Wayne and is a...

Clue: It was the last of the four major blood groups to be discovered.

Wayne Winston knew how to respond - What is AB? - to become a back-to-back "Jeopardy" winner in June 1992, taking home $16,800 and a year's supply of Touch of Butter and Eskimo Pies. Fast-forward to 2016, and he's answering virtual questions about Microsoft Excel, helping job seekers, employees and small-business owners use the spreadsheet program to find success in their professional ventures.

"In today's world, you have to keep building your skills," said Winston, co-founder of the e-learning website excelwithwayne.com and currently a visiting clinical professor at the University of Houston. "I don't think spreadsheets are going away."

He and former student Ryan Vaughn market Excel With Wayne to help people hone what is becoming an increasingly important skill in the digital workplace.

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Of the roughly 800 official occupations tracked by the government nationwide, some 80 percent have listed Excel as a requirement in job postings, according to an analysis of data compiled by O*NET, or the Occupational Information Network.

"It's now becoming sort of a ubiquitous requirement regardless of the field you're in," said Parker Harvey, senior regional economist for Workforce Solutions, which manages job services and training for a 13-county Houston-area region.

It's almost always a requirement for managerial and supervisory positions, said Harvey, who analyzed the O*NET data. But Excel can also be a requirement for relatively low-skill, low-paying jobs such as cashiers, security guards and restaurant hostesses.

A separate report found that nearly eight in 10 middle-skill jobs - those requiring more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree - require proficiency in spreadsheets and word processing, according to a March 2015 report that analyzed Burning Glass Technologies' database of online job postings.

Winston began building his expertise in Excel in 1992. He was teaching the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet at Indiana University when a student told him about Excel.

"I'd never seen Excel in my life," he said. "And then I looked at it for a day or two and I said, 'Oh my god, all this stuff I've been teaching for 15 years, which we did by hand, I can do in Excel.' "

He's since written textbooks on the program, and organizations like Microsoft, General Motors and the Navy have asked him to teach seminars or workshops. Mark Cuban, an investor on television's "Shark Tank" and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, is among his notable alumni from Indiana University.

Energetic and fast-talking, Winston enjoys peppering his classes with trivia questions. He also talks sports, a passion he began developing as a child by figuring batting averages in his head. He even created a baseball-simulation game using statistics.

As an adult, he helped the Mavericks improve their game by creating a system to analyze player and lineup performance. He also wrote "Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers, and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball and Football."

"I'd love to have a meeting with the Texans," he said of Houston's NFL team.

For the past 2½ years, Winston has been teaching at UH's C.T. Bauer College of Business. But in a classroom setting, Winston said he teaches too fast for some students and too slow for others. E-learning allows students to pause and rewind.

Excel can be used for a variety of tasks, Winston said, such as forecasting sales, determining the best price for a product, deciding how much food a restaurant should order or predicting how busy an emergency room will be.

Mark Winchester, deputy district director for the Houston office of the U.S. Small Business Administration, said Excel is an important tool that small businesses use alongside business and financial management products such as QuickBooks.

Excel With Wayne co-founder Vaughn took the skills he learned in Winston's UH class and started a consulting firm called KPI Excel. He helps businesses understand their data.

"Every company is capturing more and more data. So as technology advances, you can capture more and more data," he said. "Things that weren't available before are now becoming more available."

E-learning, he said, is a growing segment. And it can share Winston's expertise with more people.

Excelwithwayne.com offers a 21-day free trial, then charges $29 a month, or $249 a year, to access all of the Excel videos. Most videos are less than 10 minutes.

Before using the site, Tilesh Patel, a business valuation analyst with Stout Risius Ross in downtown Houston, said his Excel skills were average or below average. Now, colleagues come to him for help, and his productivity has skyrocketed.

"What used to take me a couple of days, I could probably do it in an hour now," he said.

Patel took Winston's class at UH and said the e-learning courses helped reinforce what he learned in school. He described Winston as funny and said he uses specific examples when teaching.

"He was my favorite professor in school," Patel said. "Easily the professor I learned the most from."